THE EMERGENCE of both the lesbian and the woman artist as recognizable demographics in 19th-century Europe and the United States was the product of revolutionary developments in the realms of civil rights and image-making. The ascent of the first feminist movements, the opening of art academies to women, and the democratization of photography converged to create new conditions of possibility.
Portraiture by women-loving-women of the 19th century invites us to decipher the visual codes that made lesbians of an earlier era socially legible. Moreover, studying these portraits enables us to better understand how the portrait genre participated in the formation of modern categories of feminine, sexual, and artistic identity. In 19th-century portraiture, two women pictured together was commonplace. We reflexively speculate about their relationship. Sisters? Mother and daughter? Friends? While we should not assume that all portraits featuring female couples pictured lovers, the possibility should not be ruled out. Appearing together in a formal portrait was one way that lesbians with the means to commission or create portraits signified (and sanctified) their same-sex bonds.
Such a portrait’s props and setting—whether evoking cozy domesticity, artistic enterprise, athletic prowess, or dalliance in a romantic natural environment—often provide clues. This is certainly the case with the painting by Louise Abbéma, Sarah Bernhardt and Louise Abbéma on the Lake in the Bois de Boulogne (1883) (Figure 1). This is no tame drawing-room artwork, but rather a piece that self-confidently addressed a broad viewing public. The canvas’s impressive scale (5’ high by 6.5’ wide) was calculated to attract attention in a museum, gallery, or exhibition setting. The work, in effect, monumentalized Abbéma’s relationship with Bernhardt.
Bois de Boulogne, 1883. Collections Comédie-Française.
According to the woman collector who donated the painting to the Comédie-Française, Abbéma created this masterpiece on the anniversary of her amorous liaison with Bernhardt. That would have been the couple’s twelfth anniversary, since the two met in 1871. By 1883 their liaison was public knowledge. They appeared together at social and cultural events, they vacationed together, they created and exhibited portraits of each other, and they posed together for the press.
We can imagine that many contemporary viewers walked by the double portrait without taking particular notice. However, some would have recognized Abbéma’s bold revisions of both social and artistic conventions. Art history abounds with pictures of couples together on a Sunday idyll at the lake; the scene itself would not have turned any heads. Yet while two women in a rowboat would have been a common sight in parks on the outskirts of Paris, same-sex couples were not a typically the subject of paintings. They were not “natural,” but here rendered so by the (artificially) natural setting of the landscaped park and by Abbéma’s naturalist style.
This double portrait disturbs expectations in other ways as well. Abbéma, a homely figure in black with her face profiled against a red parasol, stands midship in the rowboat. (Who stands up in a rowboat?) The natty man-tailoring of Abbéma’s costume signals that this is no ordinary woman. Her “unfeminine” clothing and her no-nonsense hairdo align her with the feminist dress-reform movement gaining momentum internationally during the late 19th century. At the same time, the artist’s no-frills attire, in this and in other portraits of her, contributes to the codification of a modern “look” cultivated by emancipated women—many of them lesbians.
Abbéma’s profiled pose directs our gaze toward Bernhardt, every bit the femme fatale, seated at the boat’s prow. Clearly the star of the painting, Bernhardt twists her corsage-adorned bust toward the viewer. Her right arm, theatrically gesturing across the bowsprit, calls attention to a pair of black swans. These elegant creatures, rare in comparison with other fowl on the lake, rhyme with the equally remarkable couple in the boat.
Abbéma made numerous portraits of Bernhardt, and Bernhardt, a talented visual artist herself, reciprocated. In 1875, the two artists exchanged bronze medallions bearing each other’s profiles in bas-relief. The same year, they made a plaster mold of their interlaced hands and then cast it in bronze. The hands, emblematic of artistic creation as well as lesbian eroticism, sacralize the interlacing of their creative and romantic lives. The sculpture appears prominently in a photograph by Thérèse Bonney taken in Abbéma’s home shortly after Bernhardt’s death. The interlaced hands share a privileged position on the mantle along with a bust of Abbéma sculpted by Bernhardt. Abbéma, one elbow on the mantelpiece, leans her head on a hand conspicuously adorned with another lesbian signifier, a pinky ring.
Both Abbéma and Bernhardt were keenly aware of the camera’s potential to commemorate liaisons, to construct artistic personas, to enhance careers, and to challenge social norms. Bernhardt had famously posed for the photographer Achille Mélandri in an immaculate, man-tailored suit beside the pedestal where she was working on Abbéma’s bust (Figure 2). There is nothing accidental about the lesbian-affirmative scenes that Bernhardt and Abbéma staged for their photographers’ visits. The photo of Bernhardt in the act of creating Abbéma’s bust was commercialized by Mélandri—printed as a “cabinet card” (a mounted enlargement) and displayed in the window of his studio along with portraits of other celebrities. It was also published as a postcard. Bernhardt’s lesbian fans were undoubtedly among the clients who made the portrait a top seller.
Bernhardt, famous for her trouser roles as well as for a repertoire of femmes fatales, insouciantly cross-dressed both on- and off-stage, to the delight of her lesbian devotees. A photograph of the actress taken in the 1890s demonstrates that her travesty was not exclusively confined to gender crossing. The portrait presents the thespian resplendent in the bat costume conceived for a dramatic reading of poems from a gay-male classic, Les Chauves-Souris (“The Bats”), by the dandy-æsthete Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac. The bat-costume portrait circulated widely. It was used on the cover of a contemporaneously published artistic biography by Jules Huret, with preface by the popular dramatist and poet Edmond Rostand. The bat photograph, too, was marketed as a cabinet card and then a postcard.
The bat-costume image cemented Bernhardt’s identification with gay male culture while boldly claiming one of its tropes as her own. The bat, a quintessentially queer creature (a mammal with wings who sleeps upside-down and does not come out until dusk) subsequently signified homosexuality for lesbians in the know. When in 1899 the Parisian courtesan Liane de Pougy offered the American expatriate and lesbian cultural crusader Natalie Clifford Barney a ring that featured a moonstone encircled by a silver bat, the implications of this motif would have been apparent to the gift’s recipient. At the same time, the queer-coded offering acknowledged Barney’s reverence for Bernhardt.
Barney restaged, at garden parties to which she invited members of her lesbian circle, versions of Bernhardt’s signature performances, such as Hamlet, L’Aiglon, and Cléopâtre. Bernhardt’s lesbian fans were visible enough in theaters to attract notice in the press, where one critic described them as “Les Amoureuses de Cléopâtre” (“Cleopatra’s female lovers”). The influence Bernhardt exerted on the nascent lesbian culture of the late 19th century cannot be overstated. An international celebrity and one of the first to capitalize on photographic images, Bernhardt modeled possibilities of creative and sexual freedom and self-determination for women. These possibilities included the formation of sexual and emotional relationships between women.
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In the late 19th century, feminists demanded rights and freedoms on behalf of a widening cross-section of women, forswearing the privileges of exceptionalism that Bernhardt, Abbéma, and other celebrated women of their generation had enjoyed. In Europe and the U.S., under pressure from an increasingly powerful feminist movement, educational opportunities (including in the arts) expanded for women during this period. Beginning in 1876, private fine-arts academies in Paris began to accept applications from women. The Académie Julian, for one, opened workshops reserved exclusively for women. Until then, women had had little access to the study of anatomy. The struggle for equal education gained momentum when in 1897 a lengthy feminist campaign paid off, compelling the national fine-arts academy to admit qualified women applicants.
at the Academy Julian, 1894.
In the same upswing of reforms, two women graduates of the Académie Julian, Martha Stettler and Alice Dannenberg (a lesbian couple), assumed directorship of the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where for forty years they encouraged women applicants. A photographic portrait of Stettler and Dannenberg, taken while they were still students at the Académie Julian, evokes the supportive ambiance of the all-women’s studio for women (Figure 3). It shows the two artists shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, turned momentarily away from their easels to make eye contact, affirming their intimate complicity.
Although educational barriers were falling, French women, particularly married women, still had to reckon with the discriminatory terms of the French Civil Code of 1804. The Code subsumed married women into a hierarchical family structure ruled by the male head of household. It was the husband’s right to authorize or deny his wife permission to enroll in school, seek employment, spend a salary or an inheritance, sign a contract, or apply for a business license or passport, among other administrative procedures that made professional artistic practice possible.
The same rules did not apply to foreigners or unmarried women (lesbians among them), who account for most of the successful artistic careers in turn-of-the-century France. Stettler and Dannenberg were Swiss as well as unmarried, and they benefited from these loopholes. By moving away from their family homes (thus, family oversight) and by forming support networks with like-minded colleagues in Paris, women expats such as Stettler and Dannenberg were able to exercise new freedoms. As artists, they enjoyed greater leeway with respect to conventions of dress and behavior than many of their peers. The arts protected women who did not conform to gender norms. Art schools incubated lifelong friendships, and the all-women workshops fostered lasting support networks.
The Swiss artist Louise Catherine Breslau, herself a graduate of the Académie Julian, constructed a career as an artist on the basis her art-school training and her art-school connections. Her portraits are set in the home and give us a sense of the social and professional life she shared with friends and lovers over the decades as she was establishing her artistic practice in Paris. The theme of domesticity in Breslau’s œuvre accentuates the close relations among the women in her circle and also the conditions of their creative lives. The home for Breslau and her housemates served not only as the locus of domestic life but also as the workplace—a home-studio.
Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts Lausanne.
A sense of intimacy permeates the atmosphere of Breslau’s paintings. La vie pensive (“The pensive life”) of 1908, for example, represents the artist seated at the table with her redheaded lover Madeleine Zillhardt (whom she met at the Académie Julian) (Figure 4). Zillhardt absentmindedly strokes the head of the couple’s Borzoi, a protective yet calming presence. The Borzoi was a gift from Élisabeth de Gramont, a lifelong supporter of the couple (who was also intimately allied with Natalie Barney).
Breslau belonged to the first cohort of women to receive professional training in the visual arts. In Paris’ academies, Breslau and the members of her cohort were able to study art at an advanced level, to work from live (nude) models, and to benefit from all-female workshops, where they received critical input from other women artists and learned from their work. The opening of academies in the late 19th century lent impetus to a paradigm shift for women in the arts. By the turn of the century, the population of professional women artists practicing in France had grown incrementally, and women had begun to achieve high visibility in official salons and international exhibitions. Women from countries around the world came to France to study and launch their careers. Some remained. Others returned to their homelands.
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Not all women artists credentialed by the academy committed themselves to careers as painters or sculptors. Some went on to embrace photography, a new technology rapidly becoming commercially available and widely accessible by the mid-1800s. In Europe and the U.S., the evolution of photography coincided with the feminist challenge to the prevailing gender system. As innovations streamlined the technology and made it affordable, women entered the photographic arena in escalating numbers.
This burgeoning professional sector offered women certain advantages. Although academic training versed women in æsthetic theory and representational conventions, advanced studies in art were not a prerequisite for achieving proficiency in the new medium of photography. Instruction manuals, trial and error, exchanges within the context of a local camera club, or perhaps a short apprenticeship in a professional studio provided an adequate basis from which to launch a career. By the same token, women photographers were not automatically obliged to shoulder the burden of an inherited artistic canon with its masterpieces, celebrated names, and established hierarchies. Potentially, women could share more-or-less equal footing with their male colleagues in an arena whose practices and parameters had yet to be defined.
Influential professionals on the international scene included more than a few lesbians. Frances Benjamin Johnston, whose partner Mattie Edwards Hewitt was a successful photographer as well, openly advocated photography as a vocation suitable for women. After her return to the U.S. from Paris—where she, too, had studied at the Académie Julian—a family friend, George Eastman (the inventor of the accessible Eastman Kodak camera who was probably gay), gave Johnston her first camera. At Eastman’s urging, Johnston reached out to Thomas Smillie, the director of photography at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. She would hone the craft of photography under Smillie’s ægis. Both Eastman and Smillie helped to launch Johnston’s career as a professional photographer and photojournalist.
The portraits of celebrities and dignitaries that constitute a major portion of Johnston’s professional portfolio, as well as many of her noncommercial photographs, are preserved in collections at the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. One portrait (now identified as a “self-portrait,” although the shutter may have been tripped by someone else, possibly Hewitt) shows Johnston sporting form-fitting trousers, a waistcoat, tailored jacket, and a fake mustache, posed alongside a high-wheeled bicycle (Figure 5).
In the 1890s, when this picture was taken, the bicycle was widely embraced by women as both a vehicle and an emblem of mobility. It was also implicated in the feminist dress reform movement. Since the prevailing feminine fashions—long skirts, corsets, a bustle—made riding a bike impossible, women cyclists donned “bloomers” or wore trousers beneath skirts. The portrait of Johnston in male drag standing upright beside a bicycle whose handlebars reach the level of her chest makes it clear that such high-wheeled vehicles were not designed with women’s clothing in mind, not even dress-reform clothing. We can well imagine how the loose fabric of the New Woman’s cycling trousers could catch catastrophically in the high-wheel’s spokes.
The “safety bicycle,” invented in 1888 and industrially produced in the 1890s, coincided with a bicycling craze around the Western world, captivating both men and women. The feminist icon Susan B. Anthony (who sat for a portrait in Johnston’s studio) considered the modern bicycle an important factor in women’s fight for equal rights. A voting rights poster from the era shows a man decked out in outdated squire’s attire astride a high-wheeled bike marked “male electors only.” An androgynous youth riding a modern safety bike with lower wheels of equal size overtakes him. The modern bike’s wheels bear the inscription “male and female—equal electoral rights.” The modern rider exclaims in passing: “What a funny old machine. Why don’t you get one like mine?” The photograph of Johnston in male drag posing alongside a high-wheeled bicycle playfully weighs in on the equality question: Can women “ride high”? Sure. If they’re men.
Johnston’s articles for The Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1880s and early 1900s, such as the one in the September 1897 issue titled “What a Woman Can Do With a Camera,” explain why “photography as a profession should appeal particularly to women” and offer practical advice to women aspiring to achieve artistic and financial success in this new field. The U.S. Census reveals that the number of women who identified themselves as professional photographers rose from 228 in 1870, to 451 in 1880, to 2,201 in 1890, and to 3,580 by 1900, and their ranks continued to swell. In 1900, Johnston organized an important exhibition of photographs by women at the International Congress of Photographic in Paris, timed to coincide with the Paris Exposition Universelle for maximum visibility. Although Johnston was officially one of only two women delegates at the International Photographic Congress, the phenomenon that her exhibition represented—women as professional photographers—was gaining momentum internationally.
Many women photographers of this era whose artistic accomplishment and commercial prowess were recognized in their own time did not earn mention in the histories of art and photography written by subsequent generations. The French photographer Céline Laguarde offers a case in point. Laguarde was one of the first women practitioners to work outside of the studio, lugging heavy equipment to the natural sites that provided the focus of her landscape œuvre. Laguarde took part in most of the major photography exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. at the turn of the century. She spearheaded delegations constituted by the influential Photo-club de Paris to represent France abroad, becoming the principal ambassador for the French pictorialists. Her romantic landscapes typify this school, which defended photography as an art form equal to painting or sculpture. Her soft-focus photographs were abundantly reproduced in art and photography magazines of the era. When pictorialism went out of fashion after World War I, her name was promptly forgotten. At the same time, male pictorialist peers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, with whom she had shared the limelight, entered the artistic canon.
We can safely assume that women photographers such as Johnston and Laguarde, whose work was buried in archives and museum collections, to be “rediscovered” by contemporary curators and scholars, represent a small percentage of the women whose practices flourished in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Nevertheless, the exemplary few whose traces have been preserved demonstrate the importance of photography as a cultural and professional lifeline for women.
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The stakes of professionalism were especially high for lesbians, the least culturally visible and socially recognized women of all. Elvira Studio in Munich rose to the challenge of redressing this situation. Two feminist activists, Sophia Goudstikker (the first female state-licensed photographer in Germany) and her lover Anita Augspurg launched this enterprise in 1887. The studio quickly earned a reputation as the hub for an emerging lesbian feminist community. The Elvira portrait œuvre constitutes a veritable who’s who of the feminist movement in Germany. At the same time, it could be viewed as an extended “family album” commemorating close relationships between and among the women of the Elvira Studio circle.
Goudstikker and Augspurg assumed leadership roles in women’s struggle for civil rights. In 1894, they founded the Society for Women’s Interests to broaden the socioeconomic reach of feminism. Augspurg contributed writings that denounced gender-based discrimination (particularly in education) to the feminist newspaper The Women’s Movement (Die Frauenbewegung). With the active support of Goudstikker, she founded a legal protection bureau for women.
An Elvira photograph published in The Week (Die Woke) in 1899 as part of a series devoted to “Leaders of the German Women’s Movement” shows Augspurg at her desk, leaning as if in thought on one fist, her dog curled up on a rug behind her. The photograph, taken by Goudstikker, pictures Augspurg as a quintessentially intelligent and independent woman. Correspondence, manuscripts, and framed portraits of women encumber her desktop.
We recognize a few these women’s faces in a group portrait taken in 1896. Five feminist activists (including Goudstikker, Augspurg, and Augspurg’s second partner Lida Gustava Heymann) align closely, bust to back, with no space at all between them. Two of the women proffer writing tablets, and each holds up a pencil, resting the tip on her chin. Heads tilted in thought, the five feminists enact their right to speak out, their authority and intellectual agency as women. Moreover, the close alignment of their pose and the homogeneity of their clothing encode their collective status as a movement: They are united, inseparable, acting as one.
When Goudstikker and Augspurg separated amicably in 1907, Elvira Studio continued, under the direction of Goudstikker and her chosen successor, to participate in the re-invention of women and their relationships well into the 1920s. A photo staged in the studio around the time that Augspurg left the business shows four women, described in the title as “students,” grouped sociably around a tea table, each with a cigarette in her mouth. The two women at the center of the composition (one of them Augspurg) lean toward each other in profile, cigarettes between their lips nearly touching, as if lighting each other’s smokes. Augspurg was no longer a student when this photograph was taken, but she had only recently graduated (with a law degree) from the university in Zurich. She had not pursued her studies in Germany because women did not have access to advanced education there at that time. The prominence of cigarettes in this photograph of “students” and in photographs of (and by) other New Women registers the re-coding of such male accessories as signifiers of women’s liberation—not to mention lesbianism. That the students in this photograph are all women represents a new development in both education and group portraiture, where “student” had been an exclusively male signifier.
Elvira was a pathbreaking enterprise in many ways, but it was not unique. Within this turn-of-the-century time frame, woman-owned photography studios cropped up all around Europe and America. These studios played important roles in women’s struggle for civil rights, including rights to self-definition and self-representation. By the same token, women-owned photography studios participated in the formation of lesbian communities and the codification of lesbian visibility. Surviving photographs by lesbian photographers record an international history of significance to all women, but particularly meaningful for women-loving-women.
Like Elvira Studio, a studio founded in 1895 by Bolette Berg and Marie Høeg in Horten, Norway, specialized in portraiture. And like Goudstikker and Augspurg, Berg and Høeg were militant feminists. Høeg founded the the Discussion Society, associated with the National Association for Women’s Suffrage, where women from the Horten community learned to engage in political debate. Høeg also sat on the Horten Women’s Council, associated with the Norwegian National Women’s Council.
In addition to the portraits that provided their livelihood, the couple developed a noncommercial sideline in their free time. Using props and painted backdrops, they staged irreverent scenes featuring themselves, family members, and friends at play. One photo shows Høeg with cropped hair, dressed only in woolen underwear, crouched face-to-face with a dog whose posture she imitates. In another theatrical photo, Høeg and Berg appear together knee-to-knee in a stage-prop rowboat (Figure 6). The setting and props recall those created two or three decades earlier by the pioneering English photographer Julia
Margaret Cameron, whose vignettes were in some cases published as book illustrations. Were Høeg and Berg aware of their English proto-feminist precursor? Did they consciously inscribe themselves in her lineage? Such questions remain unanswered at present. However—indirectly, at the very least—a link exists, since Cameron was an innovator in photographic techniques, styles, and genres that would enjoy popularity through- out the late 19th century.
Høeg and Berg’s rowboat scene also brings to mind Abbéma’s contemporaneous double portrait with Sarah Bernhardt, set in a skiff on a lake in the Bois de Boulogne. Here, however, the gender play is even more overt. Høeg, sporting male attire, holds the rowboat’s oars, while Berg, decked out in feminine finery, leans back against the stern. The stagy backdrop evokes a woodland setting; a ground cloth bunched around the hull of the rowboat enables us to imagine a turbulent stream. The couple’s hands, clearly visible, display what appear to be identical wedding bands. Although Høeg and Berg’s tableau has a tongue-in-cheek edge, unlike Abbéma’s grandiose double portrait, the photograph also, nonetheless, immortalizes a lesbian love story.
Høeg and Berg closed their studio in Horten in 1903 and moved to Oslo (then Kristiania), where they founded an art publishing house specializing in postcards (a burgeoning industry) and photographically illustrated books on culture and society. Their publication list included career-focused books for women.
Wherever photographic technologies were available, the camera offered women opportunities to shape new images of themselves, to create new histories, and to give form to new social relations. Lesbianism and feminism often set the stage for women’s embrace of the photographic medium. As we have seen, photographic portraits by so-called New Women document (one could say “invent”) relationships and forms of sociability that were heretofore not authorized or acknowledged in male-dominant cultures.
Thus far we have focused on professional practices. However, amateur and semi-professional image-makers participated in lesbian world-making projects as well. To cite just one example, Alice Austen, an independently wealthy, self-taught photographer, made her relationships with other women the focus of a prodigious œuvre. Against the odds, quite a few of her thousands of photographs have survived the indifference of institutions and the disregard of heirs. These photographs reveal to viewers today the existence of a women-centered subculture in turn-of-the-20th-century New York. Austen and her circle of lesbian friends offered one another support, safety, and fulfilment. She and her lover Gertrude Tate spent 56 years together, thirty of them in a home that is now the site of the Alice Austen House Museum, a nationally designated site of LGBT history and the setting for thousands of Austen’s photographs.
The photographic œuvre includes “private” works as well as pictures of a public nature solicited principally by friends and friends of friends. Austen illustrated her friend Violet Ward’s book Bicycling for Ladies (1896), for instance. (Ward was cofounder, with Austen, of the women’s bicycle club on Staten Island.) For Ward’s Bicycling for Ladies, Austen photographed a mutual friend, the gymnast Daisy Elliott, demonstrating the proper (and dangerously incorrect) positions to assume on a bike when turning corners, coasting, mounting and dismounting the vehicle, and handling it for repairs.
Although the practices of lesbian image-makers varied widely, as we have seen, it is nevertheless possible to come to certain general conclusions. Feminist demands for political and economic autonomy created a favorable climate for lesbian artists and photographers. Further, the allure of the camera for lesbians—a signifier of agency, of seeing and being seen—makes perfect sense at a time when women had little public presence and women-loving-women had no visibility.
In the 19th century, the very existence of lesbians was not widely acknowledged. Lesbianism was denied by lawmakers (who feared that explicitly outlawing lesbian sexual practices would have the perverse effect of promoting them). Lesbianism was misunderstood by sexologists, doctors, and psychologists as a failed or ersatz form of heterosexuality. Families expunged traces of lesbianism from their photo albums and histories. Signs of lesbianism in art, theater, and literature were censored. These campaigns of effacement help to explain why lesbian photographers, as well as many of their sisters in the fine artists, privileged the practice of portraiture—a genre that manifests and validates the existence of individuals, couples, groups, communities, and networks. In portraiture, lesbians elaborated the codes of identity that made them recognizable to one another and determined the conditions of their own visibility. Nineteenth-century lesbian portraiture makes a claim that may seem self-evident to us: “We exist!” At that time, as we would do well to recall today, such acts of self-representation were nothing short of revolutionary.
Tirza True Latimer, Professor Emerita in the History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, investigates visual culture and politics from queer feminist perspectives.
